Madison mayor Paul Soglin says that he started thinking seriously about running for governor when he saw Bernie Sanders claim an easy victory in the Wisconsin presidential primary in early 2016.
A nightmare scenario for Democrats is that Soglin may in fact prove to be Sanders in the gubernatorial primary in August but turn out to be Hillary Clinton in the November general election.
Soglin points to similarities between himself and the Vermont senator, who he supported in the primary before switching to Clinton after she won the nomination. And, in fact, there are a lot of parallels. They are close to the same age; Sanders is 76 while Soglin is 72. Both have run liberal college towns, Sanders as mayor of Burlington before he served in Congress. And they share a demeanor, which can charitably be described as blunt and somewhat aggressive.
And the appeal of that aggressiveness to angry and frustrated liberals should not be underestimated. In recent weeks three friends — who strongly supported me over Soglin when we ran against each other for mayor and who have not had a kind word for him since — have told me that they would support him for governor. It’s not that they like him, but they believe he’ll be aggressive in making the case against Scott Walker. It’s Soglin’s very unpleasantness that they find compelling.
Their argument is fair enough, but here’s the problem. Sanders won a Democratic primary, not a general election. He showed that his persona was appealing to partisans looking for a more in-your-face style of liberalism. Soglin is correct in saying that that approach could prevail again in a gubernatorial primary, but will it play in a general election?
It might not matter as the comparison might be transferred, against Soglin’s will, to another Democrat. Soglin bears similarities not just to Sanders but also to Hillary Clinton. Again, they are of the same generation; Clinton is 70. Both are from upper middle class households in the Chicago suburbs. And, here’s the key point, both were prominent Vietnam War protesters.
I don’t believe that Clinton’s college protesting days did anything to help her campaign for president five decades later. Vietnam may be fading as a cultural and political chasm, but it still matters for Americans of their generation and a little younger. And people aged 55 and older vote in large numbers.
The problem is that the narrative on anti-war protests of that era seems to be changing in a direction that hurts politicians like Soglin who cannot shake that image. The dominant narrative used to be one in which the protesters were seen as brave, idealistic young people putting their bodies on the line to fight a war that was wrong and a system that was corrupt. But the narrative that was captured so well in the 1979 documentary The War at Home seems to have been replaced by the much less sympathetic view in the recent Ken Burns’ PBS series on Vietnam.
In the Burns documentary the protesters are portrayed in a much more mixed light. Burns spends a good deal of time on the movement’s demonization of the young men, many from poor backgrounds that didn’t allow them college deferments, who were forced to fight a war they didn’t believe in while the protesters chanted from the safety of their ivory towers. Even old hippies would have to cringe at the images of Jane Fonda laughing as she cavorted around an anti-aircraft gun designed to shoot down American planes and kill American pilots.
Moreover, if the Burns narrative is becoming the dominant one, then it will impact not just voters who are old enough to remember Vietnam but younger voters who are just having their views of that era formed now. This can’t help Soglin.
So, if he gets the nomination, look for the Walker campaign to paint him not so much as Bernie Sanders but as Hillary Clinton. Soglin as Sanders could excite the Democratic base. But Soglin portrayed as Hillary Clinton could motivate the conservative one.